[racket-dev] (round), etc. in Typed Racket

From: Robby Findler (robby at eecs.northwestern.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 13 08:28:49 EST 2010

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 9:53 PM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> [ ... talking about changing integer? to only recognize exacts ... ]
> This seems like it would cause far too much breakage to far too much
> code. I certainly wouldn't want to attempt it. Changing TR (as I
> suggest below) seems far easier.

Well, I went and took a look at the tree for uses of integer? and I'm
finding that most of them have exact? nearby and some of the ones that
don't probably should. (I used DrRacket's find in files with the
regexp [^-]integer[?].)

So, I'm changing my opinion to say that it would be feasible to have
integer? in #lang racket/base mean what the current exact-integer?
means. Probably we'd want to add an inexact-integer? and then
legitimate uses of the current integer? predicate would turn into
(lambda (x) (or (integer? x) (inexact-integer? x))).

It would be some work to make all of the changes in the tree (and it
would probably be polite to audit the latest version of active planet
packages) but it doesn't seem to be as deadly as I'd feared. Also,
after having that look, I definitely think that if we got to do this
one over that integer? accepting only exacts is wise; it seems too
easy to allow inexacts to flow around when you didn't mean to with the
current definition of the predicates.

Robby


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